Dreams

I relish vivid dreams, whether good or bad. Occasionally I am gifted with what I call a blessed dream, one that has moments or entire plots infused with a degree of happiness that is only fleeting in waking life. Some of these dreams seem to take on the quality of religious or meditative ecstacy. While I have heard the theory that dreams are wish fulfillment, I think the blessed dreams are more than desire. I do not know their origin. They could be feelings that the business of living has tempered out of us, like the inverse of a tantrum. It is possible that socialization has tamed away some good along with the bad. With that aside, I admit that I believe the blessed dreams are significant enough for reflection.

Last night I had a blessed dream about one of my aunts. In this dream, I was talking to her in a sparsely furnished room, almost like a 1940’s version of an efficiency apartment. There was nothing in this apartment that was made after her birth. All had the slightly hardboiled, worn and windswept character of the years right after WWII. As she approached me, she looked to be lit from within, aglow with grace and good. It also looked liked she had been considering something bittersweet, like a hint of mourning come back from the grief of long ago.

As dreams are elusive to waking memory, I recall little of my conversation with her. She showed me a black and white photo I hadn’t seen of my greatparents standing in front of a car from the 1930’s. She told me that no one has that picture anymore. Then I felt a great amount of love as we parted.

I have had a few dreams lately about relatives in which their good natures are made manifest. In real life it seems that over the years I repeatedly lose touch with my extended family despite that I care about them a great deal.